Dragon Ball: After the End

[Rmnimoc]

Alright, I apparently did a really bad job of explaining what I'm talking about since everyone seems to have taken "When I'm talking about being unhappy about the hard work put into the conspiracy coming up flat, I'm talking about the work that we the players put into it. I imagine most of the other posters talking about the time and effort put into the conspiracy were talking about it too. Unless they're actually talking about the time and effort Kakara put into it which, yeah, is basically not a thing." as "The effort we had Kakara put into it" or "We talked about it so we should have won". To make it clear, this is 100% not what I was saying. Obviously we ultimately decided as a group to have Kakara do other things over putting effort into the conspiracy, and hopefully, you understand that I understand talking≠actions.

What I'm saying is that countless hours of work have been put into all of Kakara's actions. People make plans, debate them, learn from each other, make new plans, compromise, and then make that happen. In the two years of this quest, I have put more effort and work into the conspiracy than I have most of my college classes and I'm far from the most active person here. Heck, I'm not even the top 20. So when I'm saying I'm unhappy that the work we did came to nothing, what I'm saying is that I'm unhappy that despite all the time and effort that has been poured into the plans leading to this, Saiyan society is empirically worse for our efforts. We spent hours upon hours coming up with ideas, finding the pros and cons, and then tossing out those ideas for better ones in an effort to make the best possible plans to reach the best possible chance to save Jaffur and deal with Dandeer. If throughout every vote that came up involving the conspiracy, we had chosen all of our choices with a random number generator, I have a hard time imagining we'd come to a result that ends worse than "and then Dandeer conquered the world and mind-controlled everyone". If we had actively tried to make the worst result happen, I think we would be challenged to end up with a result that ends worse than "and then Dandeer conquered the world and mind-controlled everyone". We might have managed to add "and also Kakara is dead" to that, but that's about it. This was such a bad option that until the start of this fight it hadn't really even occurred to me that we could fail so hard in saving Jaffur that we not only get him re-mind-controlled worse than before, but we also get the entire world mind-controlled. We tried to save one person from mind control and failed so badly that the entire planet will be mind controlled. That's like going to donate blood and somehow making everyone on earth anemic.

It's the effort we put into trying to come up with the best plans that I'm saying went to waste because we got a worse result than we probably would have if we put in less than half the effort.

 

[Conceptualist]

@PoptartProdigy

As a question related to the recent issues, when did we miss out on a chance to discover the possibility of mind controled sleeper agents? This is a big factor in how I believe we screwed ourselves over in the planning for the "final" encounter.

The only time I can think getting a hint about this problem was in the reveal about the sorcerers. I, personally, didn't realize that mindwiping could stack with mindcontrol. I also didn't realize that mental effects like this could be hidden and triggered at a later date. Were there any other chances we missed or misunderstood?

 

[Cariyaga]

@PoptartProdigy

As a question related to the recent issues, when did we miss out on a chance to discover the possibility of mind controled sleeper agents? This is a big factor in how I believe we screwed ourselves over in the planning for the "final" encounter.

The only time I can think getting a hint about this problem was in the reveal about the sorcerers. I, personally, didn't realize that mindwiping could stack with mindcontrol. I also didn't realize that mental effects like this could be hidden and triggered at a later date. Were there any other chances we missed or misunderstood?

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Um, we didn't pursue the sorcerors back in the prison arc, IIRC? Might be wrong there.

 

[Aranfan]

Um, we didn't pursue the sorcerors back in the prison arc, IIRC? Might be wrong there.

Click to shrink...

We trusted our father to look into it.

...that may have been an era.

 

[Wiadi]

The problem with this idea is that just because we can lose, doesn't mean we want to lose. I think that there isn't anybody who actively participates in this quest who wanted to lose this confrontation. And now that their preferred outcome cannot happen, those people are upset. The whole "games mean sometimes losing" philosophy means a lot less outside of team sports. We, as the collective player base of this quest, want the best outcome we can get from this situation. We didn't get that.

We lost out on four years of buildup, planning, and questing due to a mistake in judging the fight we were building up to.

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Eh, I don't think that buildup was "wasted" just because it didn't achieve its goal. Despite what you seem to personally believe, even outside of team sports, games really don't have to be about "winning"/getting the "best" result/etc. Roleplaying games in particular (of which quests are a subset) can be - and often are - about telling a good story at least as much as about maximizing "success" in-universe. You're allowed to prefer the latter attitude, but I object to the notion that the rest of the playerbase has to agree with you. And from experience I can say that taking a more sanguine approach to success & failure is a big help in mitigating salt and frustration.

As a question related to the recent issues, when did we miss out on a chance to discover the possibility of mind controled sleeper agents? This is a big factor in how I believe we screwed ourselves over in the planning for the "final" encounter.

The only time I can think getting a hint about this problem was in the reveal about the sorcerers. I, personally, didn't realize that mindwiping could stack with mindcontrol. I also didn't realize that mental effects like this could be hidden and triggered at a later date. Were there any other chances we missed or misunderstood?

Click to shrink...

...well, the fact that we at no point investigated the general capabilities of sorcery up until Dandelor's reveal, despite spending years before that point planning a conspiracy against one of the greatest sorcerers on the planet, may in retrospect have been a mistake.

 

[Deathbybunnies]

We trusted our father to look into it.

...that may have been an era.

Click to shrink...

Ah, tits. I campaigned hard for asking specifically about mind control, but if everyone relevant to the investigation was already suborned...

 

[Kaiya]

The problem with this idea is that just because we can lose, doesn't mean we want to lose. I think that there isn't anybody who actively participates in this quest who wanted to lose this confrontation. And now that their preferred outcome cannot happen, those people are upset. The whole "games mean sometimes losing" philosophy means a lot less outside of team sports. We, as the collective player base of this quest, want the best outcome we can get from this situation. We didn't get that.

We lost out on four years of buildup, planning, and questing due to a mistake in judging the fight we were building up to.

As an example: nobody believed that the adults we were bringing into this fight were compromised. The vast majority of the player base believed that, since we had recruited an overwhelming amount of fight power, the moral choice of a fair trial was best. Things were planned around that belief. We structured about two year of real time questing on the fundamental assumption that those we recruited to our cause were on our side.

Frankly, I'm not personally upset out losing this fight. I'm upset that we rigged the deck against ourselves by using comprised agents as our main method of trying to win. If the mindcontrol wasn't a factor, we would have won. If we simply didn't have the people who were mindcontrolled there, we probably would have won. And if we knew that mind control of this level was possible, we would have planned everything differently. I don't know how it would have in that scenario, but that's because everything would be completely different.

Frankly, the only thing about this last update I am upset about is the mindcontrol, and how it came across like an asspull. I believe it wasn't, but that doesn't means it didn't come across like that.

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There's a lot here I'd like to address, but the big one is that you don't see roleplaying as a team sport. It is. It absolutely is. This is a game where everyone works together for a fun outcome.

Equally big is that you seem to think I'm talking about being a good sport, rather than losing being a core part of the experience. If you enter a game like this with the intent of winning literally everything, I argue that you fundamentally missing the point. This isn't Skyrim, it's not an experience you pay money for the fun of winning the day and being the hero, it's not a video game. This is an interactive story where you get to have a say in how the story progresses, but from the very outset @PoptartProdigy was clear: There's stuff arrayed against you, you can lose, you can get blindsided as hard as Goku was by Dr. Gero hiding Cell in his basement.

A story where you don't lose, where you don't get absolutely wrecked sometimes, where things are the main character winning again and again, those aren't fun stories to write. In every game I've ever been in, in the few quests I participate in (and me rarely engaging with quests is because exactly the mentality you talk about, where you want to win because you're entirely in the MC's headspace), I play to win at great cost and with myriad failures along the way. Seeing how characters deal with failure is one of the shining points of fiction, especially interactive fiction like questing. Getting to be the one who has the big anime comeback after Demon King Piccolo wrecks the planet and kills the world's strongest fighter is better than just beating Piccolo when he first shows up after winning the tournament by beating Tien.

By engaging with this quest, you agreed to the conditions of the story, its QM, and some of those conditions are that you will sometimes lose, because this is how stories work, this is what is fun to write, this is how characters work and develop and grow, and to do otherwise is to treat the experience as something different than what it actually is. That's the core of what I was saying.

 

[Bakkasama]

We trusted our father to look into it.

...that may have been an era.

Click to shrink...

I think it was less a mistake of trusting Berra and more a mistake of trying to avoid confrontation with him. Some players did have the theory that Dandeer was mind controling them but the idea was dismised by some of us (me included) and we decided not to bring it up to him, then we later forgot because we were preparing for Dazzarel.

 

[Rmnimoc]

...well, the fact that we at no point investigated the general capabilities of sorcery up until Dandelor's reveal, despite spending years before that point planning a conspiracy against one of the greatest sorcerers on the planet, may in retrospect have been a mistake.

Click to shrink...

Hindsight is 20/20. We thought Babidi instead of Morgana and we paid the price. Honestly though, I personally would never have made the jump from "can seal away memories" to "mind control" without it having happened. It makes sense now, but that's not a leap I could have made. It's hard to see the depths of a power when it's limits are mostly creativity.

To be fair though, this kind of mind control isn't something other sorcerers even thought possible, so I'm not sure how much looking into it would have helped.

 

[Gore17]

Hindsight is 20/20. We thought Babidi instead of Morgana and we paid the price. Honestly though, I personally would never have made the jump from "can seal away memories" to "mind control" without it having happened. It makes sense now, but that's not a leap I could have made. It's hard to see the depths of a power when it's limits are mostly creativity.

To be fair though, this kind of mind control isn't something other sorcerers even thought possible, so I'm not sure how much looking into it would have helped.

Click to shrink...

Except mind control has been brought up before, and mind control magic has featured in Dragon Ball media before, along with it explicitly being illegal amongst the Exiles.

 

[Conceptualist]

There's a lot here I'd like to address, but the big one is that you don't see roleplaying as a team sport. It is. It absolutely is. This is a game where everyone works together for a fun outcome.

Equally big is that you seem to think I'm talking about being a good sport, rather than losing being a core part of the experience. If you enter a game like this with the intent of winning literally everything, I argue that you fundamentally missing the point. This isn't Skyrim, it's not an experience you pay money for the fun of winning the day and being the hero, it's not a video game. This is an interactive story where you get to have a say in how the story progresses, but from the very outset @PoptartProdigy was clear: There's stuff arrayed against you, you can lose, you can get blindsided as hard as Goku was by Dr. Gero hiding Cell in his basement.

A story where you don't lose, where you don't get absolutely wrecked sometimes, where things are the main character winning again and again, those aren't fun stories to write. In every game I've ever been in, in the few quests I participate in (and me rarely engaging with quests is because exactly the mentality you talk about, where you want to win because you're entirely in the MC's headspace), I play to win at great cost and with myriad failures along the way. Seeing how characters deal with failure is one of the shining points of fiction, especially interactive fiction like questing. Getting to be the one who has the big anime comeback after Demon King Piccolo wrecks the planet and kills the world's strongest fighter is better than just beating Piccolo when he first shows up after winning the tournament by beating Tien.

By engaging with this quest, you agreed to the conditions of the story, it's QM, and some of those conditions are that you will sometimes lose, because this is how stories work, this is what is fun to write, this is how characters work and develop and grow, and to do otherwise is to treat the experience as something different than what it actually is. That's the core of what I was saying.

Click to shrink...

I'm not talking about going at this with the intention of always winning. I'm saying that, regardless of the potential to lose being a big factor in this being a good story, losing can sometimes suck. You keep saying that losing sometimes is part of the agreement between players and GMs. I completely agree. We lost this fight. I understand that, and have always understood that, is, and always has been, a possibility.

It still sucks. Good story telling ir not. Dumbledore dying in Harry Potter was a fairly good twist. It made for good storytelling. It sucked for the characters in the story to have to deal with his death. It was a heavy emotional blow at the time. Just because something is good story telling doesn't mean I am happy that it happened.

Just because I know we can lose, doesn't mean losing feels good. If losing was fundamentally the better option, we would call that winning. I, right now, am not happy with the outcome of this big climactic moment. I hate the main villain for various reasons. I wanted to not only win, but to also have a moral victory against her. Fair trial and all that.

We lost out on that. We put everyone who we care about right into the hands of our most hated enemy, and ultimately, it is the fault of the players making mistakes without knowing we were doing so.

Stop telling me that losing is part of the game like it should make me feel better about losing. Because losing sucks sometimes. Sometimes I don't care. Sometimes I'm not involved or invested enough. But I was heavily invested in the outcome of this fight. And, in the aftermath of having lost it, I feel bad.

When it feels like everything out did was pointless, you aren't supposed to like that feeling. You are supposed to feel sad, or angry, or disappointed. And because you feel that way, you try to do something that makes you feel better. That's human nature.

Given time, I will not feel bad about this. I have other things in my life that are both more important, and more impactful than this. But know that we lost when we could have reasonably won sucks

Except mind control has been brought up before, and mind control magic has featured in Dragon Ball media before, along with it explicitly being illegal amongst the Exiles.

Click to shrink...

In Dragonball media, almost all mind control was explicitly obvious and could reasonably be fought against. There are multiple instances where mindcontrol was subtle, but those were few and far between. Most mindcontrol rendered the target into a puppet for their master to wield.

We didn't consider that the bad guy would be able and willing to advance mind control magic to the point of doing what she did, and paid the price for underestimating her.

 

[Rmnimoc]

Except mind control has been brought up before, and mind control magic has featured in Dragon Ball media before, along with it explicitly being illegal amongst the Exiles.

Click to shrink...

The mind control in Dragon Ball worked by blatantly and overtly making someone evil the minion of Babidi. The mind control of Towa in the Xenoverse franchise is also blatantly obvious to both the players and the characters. Poptart said that the reason no one bothered to check people for mind control is that, while the exiles had it, it was always blatant and obvious and no one thought Dandeer might have found a way to do it subtly, not us, and not the Senzus.

 

[PoptartProdigy]

I'm pretty busy at the moment, but I can answer direct questions.

@PoptartProdigy

As a question related to the recent issues, when did we miss out on a chance to discover the possibility of mind controled sleeper agents? This is a big factor in how I believe we screwed ourselves over in the planning for the "final" encounter.

The only time I can think getting a hint about this problem was in the reveal about the sorcerers. I, personally, didn't realize that mindwiping could stack with mindcontrol. I also didn't realize that mental effects like this could be hidden and triggered at a later date. Were there any other chances we missed or misunderstood?

Click to shrink...

...hm. I don't actually think there was a firm cutoff date. Like, there was no point where I laid down a little barrier to either side of you and said, "Aaaaaaaaand now their chances of finding out drop to zero." I mean, I suppose the moment Dandeer activated her trigger on Yammar might've been it, by weight of technicality? I'm pretty sure that's not what you're asking, though.

Ah, let's see, if we're going with more straightforward opportunities, as in, opportunities which described an essentially straight causal line toward the issue of unmasking Dandeer...actually, it occurs that some people might not want to read through an exhaustive list, so:

Spoiler: Opportunities

The prison assassins were, as some speculated, Dandeer's work. Berra was under the same spell as Yammar, so he kind of let the investigation lapse once all of the obvious leads turned up blank, but had the players investigated themselves in detail, they would have uncovered a chain of clues leading her way. It wasn't the easiest chain, but they could've done it.

Another one would be investigating Clan Vegeta. That would've necessarily involved Dandeer, so you'd have looked into her. Here you'd have almost certainly stumbled across her setting up her grand ritual. She evaded notice in setting it up not through any particular skill at evading detection, but by wielding her authority to tell people to shut up and go away as a bludgeon. A determined investigator like Kakara would've very likely figured out that she was working on something big. Relayed to Dandelor, that information would then have given you the clues you needed to tell you what she was planning, which would be cause enough to just arrest her without the political objectives factoring into methodology.

Third option would have been to throw your weight around and insist that Dandelor screen absolutely every high-ranking member of the conspiracy. The idea that Dandeer would have them subverted, but allow the conspiracy to go ahead for so long, made no sense to anybody. In fact, it still doesn't, given that Dandeer came within a hair's breadth of losing, and Kakara is sure that she's still missing something. As discussed, her mind control is far in advance of the otherwise state of the art. Dandelor was the only truly reliable magical resource for the conspiracy, and screening people who obviously weren't traitors meant directly cutting into various other critical duties that needed to be performed. Kakara could've swung it -- I had a boss battle of Apra and Kakara vs. Yammar above Hall Senzu all worked out, in case -- but it would've meant throwing her weight around, as well as needing to attend to much of the conspiracy's minutiae later. That also would've led Yammar to being entirely on your side, and probably would have resulted in you confronting Dandeer almost immediately after.

Um, let's see, let's see- oh! The terrorists on the evening of you and Berra's speech to the Congress of Nations were Dandeer's work, the culmination of a conspiracy to force a breakdown in relations. Not chasing down that one is not on the players; Kakara blew the mental health check vs. stress on her own, "merits," and went into cooldown. Trail was cold by the time she was out of it.

 

[Cariyaga]

...that's an embarrassing number of ways we could have found out.

e: I kind of wish I'd known that every member of the conspiracy wasn't already screened. I would have absolutely pushed for it, but... it's a bit too late now.

 

[Gore17]

So the speculation that Dandeer was behind those problems was indeed correct. We should have kept up the pressure investigating them.

 

[Cadis]

What would be the point?

You said that you have already gamed out all possible paths, and they all lead here. Now, unless you have written up some documentation listing out all the rules of the system you designed, we have no way of knowing what possibly has a chance of working.

I, personally, want to redo the entire confrontation with fiat ruling. As in, go back to the vote we started implementing the plan, or at the very least, several updates prior to this one. You aren't giving us that option. We either have the choice of going back to fight a losing battle, after being told we have no way to win, or we can except the aftermath of a lost battle and move on.

I, personally, have lost faith in your game mechanics. If I could, I would vote to have them definitely removed but move on from this point. There have been moments where the game mechanics poked the story in interesting directions, but without a mutual understanding of what goes on behind the scenes, I just don't trust them anymore.

You see, that's my problem. Without the ability to understand the rules you operate by, there is no difference on my end whether we have strict game mechanics or not. You have repeatedly said that you want us to trust you and your game mechanics. I trust you as a GM because I have seen you interacting with your player base, and you seem to be an alright guy. I don't trust your game mechanics because I don't have a way of knowing what they are doing.

At this point, I would rather move on. It makes no difference to me with or without game mechanics. If the story continues, I'll participate and read. But I just don't care about rules that someone else knows and won't tell me. Explain your rule system better and with actual details, and I believe I would be fine with you using it.

Tl:dr
Games with rules the players don't know are kinda shit. I would rather that Poptart just make judgment calls than follow rules his player base doesn't know.

Click to shrink...

Poptart is a women.
See post below.

 

[Terrabrand]

Poptart is a women.

Click to shrink...

Poptart neither confirms nor denies their gender, last I checked, prefering 'they'. It has come up several times.

 

[Kaiya]

I'm not talking about going at this with the intention of always winning. I'm saying that, regardless of the potential to lose being a big factor in this being a good story, losing can sometimes suck. You keep saying that losing sometimes is part of the agreement between players and GMs. I completely agree. We lost this fight. I understand that, and have always understood that, is, and always has been, a possibility.

It still sucks. Good story telling ir not. Dumbledore dying in Harry Potter was a fairly good twist. It made for good storytelling. It sucked for the characters in the story to have to deal with his death. It was a heavy emotional blow at the time. Just because something is good story telling doesn't mean I am happy that it happened.

Just because I know we can lose, doesn't mean losing feels good. If losing was fundamentally the better option, we would call that winning. I, right now, am not happy with the outcome of this big climactic moment. I hate the main villain for various reasons. I wanted to not only win, but to also have a moral victory against her. Fair trial and all that.

We lost out on that. We put everyone who we care about right into the hands of our most hated enemy, and ultimately, it is the fault of the players making mistakes without knowing we were doing so.

Stop telling me that losing is part of the game like it should make me feel better about losing. Because losing sucks sometimes. Sometimes I don't care. Sometimes I'm not involved or invested enough. But I was heavily invested in the outcome of this fight. And, in the aftermath of having lost it, I feel bad.

When it feels like everything out did was pointless, you aren't supposed to like that feeling. You are supposed to feel sad, or angry, or disappointed. And because you feel that way, you try to do something that makes you feel better. That's human nature.

Given time, I will not feel bad about this. I have other things in my life that are both more important, and more impactful than this. But know that we lost when we could have reasonably won sucks

In Dragonball media, almost all mind control was explicitly obvious and could reasonably be fought against. There are multiple instances where mindcontrol was subtle, but those were few and far between. Most mindcontrol rendered the target into a puppet for their master to wield.

We didn't consider that the bad guy would be able and willing to advance mind control magic to the point of doing what she did, and paid the price for underestimating her.

Click to shrink...

Okay, well. I was happy that Dumbledore died, because it made me feel sad. I was happy in my first RP game I got to play in when my goals were shattered, my fortune left in ruins, and myself with a legal sword of Damocles over my head, because I got to stare a government in the eye and spit, I got to play the grand, proud villain, and be brought down epically for my hubris.

I was happy in my other favorite quest when the main character was crippled as part of her epic victory against impossible odds. And I'm happy here to see that @PoptartProdigy is a QM willing to bring the hammer down when the numbers come up snake eyes. It's not just human nature to engage with a game and react poorly to unexpected consequences. It's a product of a mindset where you expected to win and so losing feels like a failure condition, rather than like as much a part of the story as winning. I don't see this loss at a bad thing. I like the consequences it will have. I like that actual, serious losses were suffered, because that makes it real. Makes me feel like everything that has been done matters.

 

[Adept_Woodwright]

On the plus side, there now exists a foolproof method to check for subversive control:

Send a packet of memories indicating the badness that Dandeer committed. If there is no sign of cognitive dissonance, then the memory was erased immediately by the subversive control spell.

If it takes a moment, then it was the self-reinforcing mindwipe.

This may be useful when we eventually return.

 

[Bakkasama]

On the plus side, there now exists a foolproof method to check for subversive control:

Send a packet of memories indicating the badness that Dandeer committed. If there is no sign of cognitive dissonance, then the memory was erased immediately by the subversive control spell.

If it takes a moment, then it was the self-reinforcing mindwipe.

This may be useful when we eventually return.

Click to shrink...

Unless she changes the control method. She does seem to like researching new applications for magic.

 

[Conceptualist]

Makes me feel like everything that has been done matters.

Click to shrink...

I understand the mentality you have stated you possess. I do not, exactly, share that mindset. I do appreciate the fact that the quest is consistently doing new and interesting things. I am definitely looking forward to the next fight. And I agree that losing things can make the world seem more real.

The problem, or rather, the disconnect between our mindsets is that I feel we didn't do enough of the "right" things we had a chance to do. I feel disappointed that we lost this encounter. I look forward to the rematch. And I agree that the players actions seem so much more real than they did beforehand.

In short, I feel bad right now because the character I have grown to emphasize with feels bad. I look forward to seeing that character do everything in her power to change the situation around.

Also, longer term I was also happy about Dumbledore's death, because of how it impacted and improved the other characters and the setting as a whole. It really set the stakes of the final book in perspective. It just takes some time to come to terms with big twists like that. I'm sure in a week or two I will like the fact we lost somewhat, for much the same reasons as you have stated. But right now I am upset, and logically recognition of good storytelling doesn't mean that I wasn't also heavily drawn in by the character's emotion turmoil. It just has this weird dichotomy in my head of happy and frustrated right now.

 

[Conceptualist]

I would rather that Poptart just make judgment calls than follow rules his player base doesn't know.

Click to shrink...

Poptart is a women.
See post below.

Click to shrink...

Poptart neither confirms nor denies their gender, last I checked, prefering 'they'. It has come up several times.

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Sorry, @PoptartProdigy. I'll try to use they from now on. I didn't know.

Also, regardless of exactly how you resolve the issue with game mechanics, do you think you could take some time put out a Google Doc or something with the rules you followed for the current system?

I liked how it worked out overall, I just want to understand it better now that I know it had a much bigger impact on the quest than I knew. To be completely honest, I didn't know that you weren't going completely by GM fiat for a really long time. If I had known previous to about a month or two ago, I forgot, because it just wasn't in my face relevant.

 

[Cadis]

I mean the real reason we lost, is because no one treated Dandeer as a threat. Like very little of votes or discussion focused on, "okay, this is a fight that we could easily lose if we're not careful, let's be cautious and take no chances in how we confront her." In the end, we assumed her defeat was fait accomplai.

 

[Tylonius]

...hm. I don't actually think there was a firm cutoff date. Like, there was no point where I laid down a little barrier to either side of you and said, "Aaaaaaaaand now their chances of finding out drop to zero." I mean, I suppose the moment Dandeer activated her trigger on Yammar might've been it, by weight of technicality? I'm pretty sure that's not what you're asking, though.

Click to shrink...

So, this entire encounter was a no win scenario? Which I suppose is the nice way of looking at it, the other way being that this was a stacked deck and we lost two years ago when we recruited him.

 

[Pittauro]

The prison assassins were, as some speculated, Dandeer's work. Berra was under the same spell as Yammar, so he kind of let the investigation lapse once all of the obvious leads turned up blank, but had the players investigated themselves in detail, they would have uncovered a chain of clues leading her way. It wasn't the easiest chain, but they could've done it.

Click to shrink...

i knew it! it was obvious it was her, but i didn't consider Berra being already under her spell.
Stupid mistake, really (i was also not playing at that point, but i thought it was obvious when i read it)

Um, let's see, let's see- oh! The terrorists on the evening of you and Berra's speech to the Congress of Nations were Dandeer's work, the culmination of a conspiracy to force a breakdown in relations. Not chasing down that one is not on the players; Kakara blew the mental health check vs. stress on her own, "merits," and went into cooldown. Trail was cold by the time she was out of it.

Click to shrink...

...i didn't even consider to connect this one to her! Of the four cases it was probably the harder to connect.

Damn, we did miss a lot of things.

Unless she changes the control method. She does seem to like researching new applications for magic.

Click to shrink...

she's also pretty arrogant. If she thinks the method is perfect as it is, she might choose to research something else.